1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communications devices. More specifically, the present invention relates to screening the context and priority of incoming calls.
2. Background of the Invention
The importance of incoming calls varies greatly. For instance, a wife calling her husband may be calling to inform him of a family emergency or simply to tell him to pick up milk from the grocery store on the way home. Unfortunately, a cellular telephone user has no way to distinguish between these types of calls. The user may unknowingly ignore a very important call due to being in a meeting or simply chatting with a friend.
Today, when a call comes in, all a telephone user knows is the originating phone number or name of the person to whom this number belongs. This provides no information about the nature, purpose, or the importance of the call, which makes it difficult for the telephone user to determine whether to pick up the call, especially when one is busy or preoccupied. This situation may lead a telephone user to either lose a call he would have otherwise picked up, or pick up a call he would have otherwise passed. When a telephone user ignores an incoming call for lack of context information, he or she is left speculating about the nature and importance of the call, causing emotional stress or costly consequences, such as missing critical business information in the middle of an investor meeting. Current telephone systems also leave the caller no way to provide context information for the call to prompt the telephone user to pick up. The only alternative available today is to send a text message to the device.
As telephones become more and more sophisticated, the caller identification system may seem awkwardly simple and underachieving. Cellular telephones come equipped with custom ringtones and vibration alerts. With this level of technology there needs to be a better way to alert a callee of the context and priority of a call before the callee answers the phone.
There is a need for a telephone or a system which allows a caller to input a brief context of the call being placed and a priority level of the call. There is also a need for a callee to be notified of this context and priority information in order to determine whether or not to answer the call before answering the call.